MinDeg: a performance-guided replacement policy for run-time reconfigurable accelerators

Reconfigurable Processors utilize a reconfigurable fabric (to implement application-specific accelerators) and may perform runtime reconfigurations to exchange the set of deployed accelerators during application execution. Depending on the application requirements, the high utilization of the reconfigurable fabric (due to run-time reconfiguration) leads to a performance improvement compared to non-reconfigurable application-specific processors (ASIPs). However, as the reconfiguration time of fine-grained reconfigurable fabrics (i.e. FPGA-like structures) is rather long (in the range of milliseconds), it is crucial to avoid frequent cycles of reconfiguration-replacement-reconfiguration of the accelerators in order to exploit the real benefits of Reconfigurable Processors. Similar to memory caches, a replacement policy has to decide which reconfigurable accelerators shall be replaced in order to reconfigure additional accelerators. In the case that a recently replaced accelerator is dem...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: CODES
• Authors: Lars Bauer, Muhammad Shafique, Jörg Henkel
• Keywords: CODES 2009, Reconfigurable Accelerators, Reconfigurable Fabrics, Reconfigurable Processors